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Crab, Potted
Pick the meat from the shell and claws of a freshly-boiled crab. Pound it in a mortar with salt, cayenne, and pounded mace. Press it into small jars, cover it with butter, and bake it in a moderate oven for half an hour. When cold, pour freshly-clarified butter over it, and set it aside to get cold. The remains of a crab that has been partly eaten may be used in this way, but it should be baked on the day on which it was opened. Probable cost, 6d. for a two-ounce jar. Sufficient for two persons.
A straightforward Victorian potted shellfish, and one of the few potting recipes that still earns its place. The details that matter are the oven temperature, the butter seal, and how long the finished jars can honestly be kept.
- The seal is the whole pointThe butter poured over the cold pot must cover the surface completely, with no crab breaking through and no gaps at the edge of the jar. Any exposed meat spoils first and taints the rest. Use clarified butter as instructed — the milk solids and water in whole butter spoil more quickly.
- Moderate ovenRead this as 325-350F. The crab is already cooked; the baking is only to melt the butter through the meat and drive off surface moisture. Half an hour suits a 2 oz jar, and small jars set in a roasting tin of hot water will heat more evenly than jars sitting on a bare shelf.
- Storage, honestlyA butter seal slows spoilage; it does not preserve. Refrigerate these and eat within three days, and discard any jar whose butter cap has been broken and left standing.
- How much crabA 2 lb live crab yields roughly 6-8 oz of picked meat, brown and white together, which fills three or four 2 oz jars. The brown meat from the body carries most of the flavour; all-white meat pots taste thin and pale.
- Mortar or machinePounded mace means whole blade mace crushed fine — ground mace from a jar works, about a scant quarter teaspoon per 8 oz of meat. If you use a food processor rather than a mortar, pulse briefly; run it long and the crab turns to paste and loses its texture entirely.
- Seasoning to the saltButter mutes the seasoning. Season the pounded mixture, taste it cold, and correct before potting, because once the butter cap is on there is no adjusting it.
- Freshly boiledTake the instruction literally. Pasteurised tub crabmeat will work but has already been heated once and gives a softer, wetter pot; the note about using the remains of an opened crab the same day reflects real risk rather than thrift alone.
- Yield and serving"Sufficient for two persons" describes a 2 oz jar as a savoury or a breakfast dish, not a main course. Serve at cool room temperature with hot toast, and lift the butter cap off rather than stirring it in.
Potting — cooking a meat or fish, packing it into an earthenware jar and sealing it under a cap of clarified butter — was standard English larder practice from the seventeenth century onward, and by the time Cassell's was compiled in the 1870s it had shifted from preservation method to teatime luxury. The butter excluded air well enough to keep a pot sound for some days in a cold room, which was why potted meats travelled well and appeared on inn tables and picnic hampers. Crab was a natural candidate on a coast where the catch was landed daily and could not be held, and the closing note about using "the remains of a crab that has been partly eaten" shows the recipe doing the other job of potting: salvaging good food before it turned. The whole family — potted beef, potted tongue, potted char, potted lampreys, potted shrimps — belonged to this tradition, and several are still sold in Britain today in exactly this form, a sealed pot under spiced butter.